This is a collection of some of the art work I have made, a lot of it, not all.  Some pictures of it and some text about what I have thought and still think, and sometimes some of why and how.

My concerns have been the visual arts: drawings, paintings, sculpture, assemblage.  Things made by hand when provoked by visual perception of the outer world surrounding the artist and everyone else, as registered by the inner world unique to the artist as a person.

The provocation is answered by expression.

So perhaps one becomes an artist based on how sensitive the person is to the provocation of visual perception.  This must be an innate sensitivity, only a certain amount can be learned.

It could be more simply said that art work is a product of the need to express, as well as being about that need.  This need can be constant, it can be fleeting, it can be capricious –it can disguise or hide itself, become manic or obsessive.  There are many forms of expression of course, and as many drives behind them, but I believe visual art is distinguished from other forms of expression by an inexplicable element, or, “the” element of the inexplicable.

I think perhaps one can talk around the “inexplicable”, but its true operation and essence will always remain precisely that, inexplicable.  “The inexplicable” is my artificial construct of a kind of metaphysical space containing acts of looking around at the world and feeling inside myself (can’t even say exactly where) a profound recognition. In that unidentifiable space where recognition happens, a trigger simultaneously goes off setting in motion the creation of a response in the realm of visual art.  The visual artist is one who looks around and somehow experiences a kind of recognition and is compelled to put that recognition into visual expression.

The spark, or ignition, of the inexplicable in an artist’s work is recognition.

The vehicle is the relationship between the hand of the artist and what is being expressed.

The alchemy of this relationship is successful when following through on the need to express, but necessity alone does not insure any success.

The dimensions, so to speak, of the need to express might be the intention and the how.  The intentionto express, to transmit perhaps, a recognition, is where the emotional and intellectual attributes of the artist’s response are involved.  How the work is made, how the expression is housed, is where the craft, the technical process and physical attributes come in.  Much of the craft can be acquired, but its relation to intention can only be hinted at.  They’re sometimes nearly indistinguishable.

The intention and the how are continually filtering through, affecting each other during the making.  Talent is not just about how well an artist fulfills cultural expectations.  Talent is about how the artist juggles and ultimately marries intention and how in the art work.  A work of art is finished when the juggling has produced the most felicitous marriage of these two – again, something that is recognizable but inexplicable!

What is extraordinary is that when the artist succeeds, the viewer also has a recognition – that of the success of the artist’s effort.  And this happens even though the most important part of a work of art,“the inexplicable”, is impossible to define and therefore impossible to instruct, to either the artist or the viewer.

Great art both contains and evokes the inexplicable. This is particularly so when the making of it is a search to understand and enhance life, and takes place in the absence of irony. I strongly suspect art is at its best when this process is that of a search for beauty.  Sincerity in the search for beauty, not any one style or convention of beauty – not the fashionable, timely, pretty or ugly one.  Perhaps underneath those or just somewhere else in a timeless realm, there are many coexistent definitions of beauty; it is the search, not the definition that matters. Simple respect for the world, for all outside and inside oneself, garners infinite plethora of unique instances of beauty.  This is true also of at least one close relative of beauty, which is truth.

This search for beauty is also what produces the viewer’s perception of the inexplicable in the work of art.  It raises art above the rest of life and art-making above the other and otherwise magical activities of life.  The idea may be to tinker in the timeless realm of meaning, yet it will succeed only when the search for beauty is a humble one, one treated as everyday commonplace and with a large dollop of good humor.   Otherwise, the search for beauty can morph, like all and any good intentions, into standard-bearing pomposity and falsehood.

The ability of an artist to attain to the inexplicable and the possibility of putting it in works of art, is simply not common.  Charisma and drama have both been mistaken for the phenomenon of great art at whose center is the inexplicable.  “The inexplicable” can’t be artificially set off, so essentially it has to be humble.  It can’t be induced by alcohol, drugs, or, even in their absence, ecstasy.  It’s not as straight-forward as direct expression of ecstatic feeling.

The inexplicable is what raises in the artist the need to express outside of the self.  Or, I want to say simply, that the inexplicable, existing everywhere in the world, that which must be perceived and then put into each work of art, is what distinguishes the making of visual art from all the other activities of life.  It distinguishes an artist’s need to express, and the resultant work of art, from the artist’s individual and circumscribed nature, which is of course as common as that of any other being.  It is not required to be a lunatic, magus, or genius to be a good, even great artist.  But of course history does show that some of the uncontestedly sublime art seems to have been made by those who were considered genius, magus, and lunatic, and who were also highly skilled in the crafts and techniques of their materials.

This way of trying to approach the importance of life and art makes it all so elusive, it is a notion of such volatile quicksilver.

Even while so mercurial, it is bafflingly observable

None of my artwork has attained the stature or the impact of the sublime that is possible with“the inexplicable” factor.  I have maintained that all of life is worth doing artistically and well, and I hope my life’s activities have fed into some of my artworks enough to give them voice now and then.

I have enjoyed making art.  This above all, I hope is perceivable.